The present invention relates to a printing apparatus and a printing system.
Conventionally, in some photofinishing shops, commonly called mini-labs, normal prints are produced by an operator's manual operation in accordance with the order of customers, in order to instantaneously deliver the prints to the customers. Recently, there has been well known a printing apparatus in which the original is photo-electrically read out to obtain image data, and a print is made based on the image data, or based on directly inputted image data (for example, image data by a CD-ROM or a communication line).
Incidentally, in the printing apparatus which produces prints based on the image data, the image data can be processed by using various image processing methods. Accordingly, sometimes, the customers request the following processings other than ordinary printing: for example, large-sized print formats which takes a long time period for image enlargement processing; layout print formats requiring rotation of the image or arrangement of the image; or specially processed print formats by which special effects are added to the print by conducting dodging or printing-in, or sharpness conversion processing of the image.
As described above, other than ordinary print format services, there are also special print format services. Generally, in these special print format services, there are many services requiring a long time period, therefore, sometimes these services interfere with the ordinary printing service which is to quickly deliver ordinary prints to customers. On the contrary, some customers feel it more convenient to receive their prints the next day, rather than on that day. In these cases, efficiency of the printing apparatus will be improved by continuous operation during, e.g., the operator's rest time or midnight. This fact would contribute to reduction of its production cost, since it becomes possible to intensively operate the printing apparatus during times of low power consumption and low energy charge.
In digital exposure methods in which a printing apparatus forms an image by exposing each pixel based on image data, it becomes possible to utilize the apparatus even during the operator's rest or non-duties time for continuous operation of the printing apparatus by applying the following steps: obtaining customer's order information which includes the image data and the order information corresponding to the image data; temporarily storing the image data and order information corresponding to the image data in a memory; and producing prints on the basis of the image data and order information corresponding to the image data stored in the memory. In this case, however, since the operator would not manually operate the printing apparatus, the printing apparatus should have automatic controlling functions described as follow: a printing control for obtaining a maximum number of prints without loss of recording mediums; a control for automatically stopping the printing operation; and a control for automatically stopping the temperature conditioner for the printing apparatus.
Further, a printing apparatus and a printing method in which a digital print is formed based on digital image data and the corresponding print order data, which are stored in a memory by a reception processing means, are set forth in Japanese Tokkaihei No. 10-78618. In this prior art, however, there is disclosed no method to effectively conduct the above-described printing operation while the ordinary printing operation is actually conducted. Therefore, improvement of the printing efficiency could not be attained by the prior art cited above.